Two in the bush are worth less than you’d imagine at the following link.

The content of this episode is nothing more than our breathless and shellshocked analysis of E3 – an analysis I’ve come to believe makes as little sense as the expo’s press conferences and show floor. It is inevitable that we spend several long hours once a year detailing our reactions to the industry’s largest collection of lies, misdirection, marketeering and swank gameplay videos. Unfortunately, our senses are crippled in the aftermath, and our opinions aren’t worth half what they might be in the weeks and months to come, when statements have been clarified and timelines made firm. In the meantime, we offer a record of our own imperfect understanding of the event in question.

We recorded this show on the cusp of E3, at a moment when most of our expectations for the show still seemed viable and only a few of the rumors were coalescing into fact. It’s clear that our hand of expo-bingo was a loser, but we hadn’t expected to be so very wide of the mark. Now that we’ve put the show behind us once again, it’s time to sit down in front of the mic to lay out our feelings. Before we do, however, you ought to know just how optimistic we were a short week ago.

This isn’t the sort of guilt you’d feel over any of your typical worldly transgressions, no. What we have (and have had for some time) is the perennial guilt that only a gamer, or maybe a bookworm, could feel. It isn’t a revelation, and we’re far from alone, but that doesn’t make us regret our unplayed games any less. It’s likely that the pain is especially sharp now because summer was the traditional season for eating through a backlog, and our minds still expect to weather the dry months of our youth. We’ve been cursed with precisely what we asked for, and we were unprepared to accept the blessing.

Despite reports of countless technical faults and a middling experience south of the border, Red Dead Redemption owns our full and complete attention this week, even for those of us who were lukewarm on the prospect. It has strong similarities to and differences from the parent GTA series, of course – each in the right places and in just the right amounts to draw us in, regardless of our feelings about the not-so-old west. I had hoped to be trading scary stories about Alan Wake this week, so I was a little disappointed to find myself living so deep in the horse-flesh and gunplay. There are worse things to bear, though, and good fun is all we can reasonably ask. The ghost stories and nightmares can wait.